"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis

9.8.13

Two Related Points

1. Interesting that most of the items on this list of suggested tv adaptions are genre pieces.

2. It's still interesting that the word of choice for The Wire is 'Dickensian.' Assuming it doesn't mean "has a lot of characters," it's odd that the highest-praised tv show of all time equates to the work of a middle-of-the-road 19th century author who wrote like he was getting paid by the word (as he often was). There are, I think it's safe to say, no tv series that meaningfully ape Dostoevsky, or Zola, or Kafka, nor could there be--were they to engage in it, they'd fail as tv.* (There are, of course, many tv series that have gleefully inherited the spirit of Tristam Shandy and the like, but comedy is different.)

I think we're in a golden age of tv because people have accepted the limitations of the medium and lowered expectations accordingly.

The weird thing is there's lots of good stuff on tv, but then, there usually is. It's not necessarily the best stuff ever--how would we even know?--if someone were to suggest that the best albums of all time were recorded in the last 15 years we'd recognize the problem with that--the problem is not the material, but the hyperbolic overrating of that material.

*Lost might be Kafkaesque--a deranged version of The Castle in which they believe themselves to be making a character-driven drama but are actually making a science fiction show--but it was certainly unintentionally so. Which probably makes it more Kafkaesque.